http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5190303/

How will they be able to stop a straight PCM capture followed by lossless compression?

I guess Pandora's Box is not empty for these guys yet.

Yknow, ultimately, there's gonna need to be some serious rewriting of the copyright laws. They've been using the same laws for how many years?

Media and accessibility has changed... radically. The more the RIAA fights these changes, the more they're going to suffer from it.

By passing laws that state that all digital radio decoders must implement copy controls preventing just such a thing like a digital PCM output or some kind of broadcast flag or something else.

Gotta admit, they're learning. If you don't get the laws passed before the hardware is created and adopted, then you can't control it.

Of course this is all a moot point as the RIAA and major labels will not exist within 10 years. Or rather, they'll exist but not be recognizable by the current standards, as such. The industry is changing and they'll either adapt or die. You can't stop progress. No laws will do it. No controls will do it. It'll simply happen and either you roll with it or get run the heck over.

otto...i think i know what you're saying...BUT...you've also got to realize that oftentimes the BEST idea is never realized by the masses; not because they're willingly choosing otherwise, but because what they perceive is spun so markedly that it seems stupid to choose otherwise:

if you're familiar with the public school reform debate at all: there's unbelievable topheaviness of public schools, but it's virtual impossibe to get any real reform due to the HUGE amount of the offending topheavy part being very close to capitol hill. any time a school reform bill is put up, all these bureaucrats who leech pay from teachers see a real threat to their jobs, and show up en masse to fight the bill, through various methods including branding anyone that supports reform as being 'against teachers'. well, well, well! nobody likes anyone against teachers!

and, since most of the public simply does not have the time nor the energy to be kept up to date and informed on all the choices (whatever 'informed' means), they've almost got to listen to the loudest voice.

now...all that to say...it's going to be a major reform for record labels to not look the same way that they do now, or very close, because so few of them control so much of the market (that's why we've got antitrust laws...now, if there could be some sort of effective antitrust law brought to bear against these ?5? major labels, THAT could cause some major reform), and so much capital, that they can virtually pay to shape public opinion.

case in point: who, of your non 'techie' friends really knows what is legal and what is illegal when it comes to music on the internet? i mean...apparently, i'm hearing that downloading isn't even a problem, but rather the uploading (i have no idea if that's really the case, just making a point)....but if you look at that pepsi/itunes ad; what was that doing but presenting a very skewed version of what's going on? so....i just personally don't see major reforms being a thing that's going to happen in 10 years; at least if you meant that in the way that it seems you meant it; in a way that would warrant my reply here.

please let me know why you think otherwise....this is interesting.

This is not interesting. Throw Digital Radio into the same trash heap of crippled digital formats with DVD-Audio and SACD....

Actually, both are illegal, as they are forms of copyright infringement. It's debatable as to who's doing the copy here, but you can make the case either way.

The main people being *sued* were people who had large collections of files being shared. Why? It's easier to prove that sort of thing in court. If they had a lot of files, then a big list of shared files is nice to have. If they downloaded one copy of a britney song, then the judge is kinda like "thank you for wasting my time, jackoffs". See what I mean?


I don't see major reform coming from within currently. I see it being forced to occur due to the nature of market forces. Filesharing is *still* on the rise, despite scare tactics. And now there's a lot more projects in the works to anonymize it or make it untracable and such. Most of them are deluded in some respect or another, but there's a few that might be really be onto something there.. My point is that the internet, considered as an entity, tends to route around problems like these. At some point somebody will develop a method to share files in such a way as to leave them nobody to sue. What the hell do they do then? How do they possibly stick to their old business model when it's blown apart by free, untracable, copyright infringement for everybody?

They can't. It's that simple. They have to develop a new model and a new way of selling things. And online music stores, like iTMS to pick the most obvious example, are doing this sort of thing. The business model there is one of convienence. Why search for songs when you can find them right there? Yeah, it costs a buck, but hell, what's a buck, really? That's negliable. And you get a good quality (not great, just good) audio file out of it. It might even supplant the labels, Apple has been putting music by independent *artists* up in the iTMS lately. Artists who have sent their music directly to Apple and gotten placement. No labels involved.

All I know is that the one constant in the technology realm has been change. Things change. Well, perceptual audio compression has sucked the music industry into the technology realm and now they're going to have to start changing to cope with it, or market forces will destroy them. That's just the way it works. Okay, so it seems like more of a gut feeling here.. I can't predict the future. But from what I can tell, they don't seem to have much choice in the matter any more.

What is the quality of digital radio? I'd guess < 96kbps.

In my opinion RIAA is a little too late in enforcing their nazi laws. Most people already have all the music that they will ever need in their HD's.

As I said here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&...ting.google.com

is it worth copying, never mind protecting?

You'd have to transcode from a 96kbps source to get a useable copy anyway.

Maybe that's OK for most folks?

Cheers,
David.

Most stations are between 128 and 256 Kbps.

Audio Quality on DAB Stereo Stations Around the World
DAB Ensembles Worldwide

Read more about DAB here:
WorldDAB
DAB - a technical explanation (PDF file)

Edit: I'm not sure what the average bitrate is in the USA

The USA doesn't use DAB.

In the UK, the average DAB bitrate (using MPEG-1 layer II i.e. mp2) is currently 129kbps. We're not happy:
http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/worldwide_dab.htm

Cheers,
David.

Yes... I just discovered that.. Looks like they are using another system called HD radio.



See iBiquity Digital for more about HD radio

Granted the quality is OK, but since the stations don't play entire albums back-to-back, who in their right mind would spends days trying to compile an album?

The quality of downloaded mp3s; from usenet, IRC or torrents; is not bad, but you never know how it was ripped/encoded (encspot is old and buggy). Moreover, it might have been reencoded, or worse, recorded from vinyl or cassette and passed through a plug-in that gets rid of the hiss and destroys the music.

I hate buying music, not because of the money, but because of RIAA. So if I have to add new mp3s to my collection, I usually buy it at 70% off the retail price from e-bay or amazon.com used cd's.

Assuming you could tell, programmatically, what the song name/album was, then you could simply hook up a program to do your listening and recording and then it'd simply record whenever it saw some album name float by. Think of it like a Tivo for radio.

Of course, honestly, you're never going to get an entire album. They don't play all the songs on an album, just the released singles, usually.